Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  Those novels or novellas or short stories or prose poems would be widely read, but only their author would know what they really were and who they were addressed to. As for that person, the one whose motor car had started up suddenly among the dry sounds of grasshoppers on a hot afternoon, that person would almost certainly never read any of the published fiction. That person would have been won over years earlier by the doctrines of Waldo, and in all the years since the founding of our group not a single apostasy has been recorded. The expelled writer is still one of us, and like every other follower of Waldo he or she would read no fiction by any living author. He or she might buy the latest books and display them all around the house, but no author would be read until that author was dead.

  No living author would be read because the reader of a living author might be tempted one day to search out the author and to ask some question about the text or about the weather on the day when this or that page was first composed or about a certain year of the author’s life before the first sentence of the text came into being. And to ask such questions would be not just to violate the most sacred tradition of Waldo; it would be as if to say that the old stone house by Penobscot Bay has never existed, that Frances Da Pavia and Patrick McLear are no more substantial than characters in a work of fiction, and that the Waldo theory of fiction—far from having produced some of the finest writers of our day—is itself the invention of a writer: a bit of whimsy dreamed up by a man at a writers’ workshop and handed to the writer-in-charge so that a woman with light-brown hair and a frowning face would learn why the man had not yet told her how impressed he had been by her story of a man who worried about bedrock.

  In an earlier draft of this paragraph—a draft that you will never read—I began with the words: “You may be wondering about that ritual bonfire mentioned a little distance back…” But if you had read those words you would have wondered not just how the words could have reached you if all the pages written during the workshop are ritually burned on the last evening; you would have wondered also who the word “you” referred to. If these pages are being written on the veranda of a stone house during a writers’ workshop, you might say to yourself, why are they seemingly addressed to me: to someone who reads them in very different surroundings? For the pages are much too explanatory to have been written for the other workshop members—why would five followers of Waldo have to be told in the opening paragraphs of a piece of workshop fiction all the rules and traditions so well known to them?

  But you have almost answered your own objection. You have spoken of this writing as fiction. This is the truth. These words are part of a work of fiction. Even these last few sentences, which can be read as an exchange between the writer and a reader, are fiction. Any thoughtful reader would recognise them for what they are. And the writers at a Waldo workshop are the most thoughtful of readers. When these pages are put in front of them, my fellow writers will not demand to know why they have to read an account of things already familiar to them. They will read with even more than their usual alertness. They will try to learn why I have written in the form of a piece of fiction addressed to strangers far away from this hilltop a piece of fiction that only they can read.

  And yet, you still want certain puzzles explained. (Or, to put this more clearly, if you existed you would still want those puzzles explained.) If the ritual bonfire consumes all evidence of the workshop, why should I write as though these pages are going to be preserved?

  My first impulse is to answer, “Why not?” One of the most cherished anecdotes among the followers of Waldo is of the writer who begged for a last few minutes while the other members of the workshop were already around the fire and making scrolls of their pages, tying bundle after bundle with the obligatory silk ribbons in the Waldo colours of pale-grey and sea-green, and tossing their bundles into the flames. During those last few minutes the writer crouched in the glow from the flames and scribbled over and over the same sentence for which the right order of words and the right balance among the subordinate clauses had still not been found.

  With Waldo it is the spirit that matters rather than the form. No writer is stripped and searched before leaving a workshop. No luggage is forcibly opened on the front veranda on the morning of departure. If you still believe that I am writing these words to be read by someone outside the workshop, then you only have to imagine my slipping this typescript under the heap of my soiled underclothes on the last night …

  Now the danger may be that I am making Waldo seem a mere set of conventions to be varied if occasion demands. I assure you that Waldo weighs heavily indeed on me. Every page that I write here on this veranda will be tied, five nights from tonight, in the colours of ocean and fog and burned in the view of five writers whose good opinions I value, even if I may never learn their true names.

  And I follow the way of Waldo even more strictly for having read sometimes, on the last day of a workshop, the implication that we are not meant to take Waldo seriously after all: that these monastic retreats with their fussy rituals, the manual with all its rules, the house in Maine, although they are, of course, part of a solid world, are only meant to work on the imagination of writers and to suggest how seriously one might take the writing of fiction in an ideal world.

  At this point someone who had never heard of Waldo before reading these pages might need to be reminded that the isolation of Waldo writers is not relieved during hours of darkness.

  The co-founders in their wisdom decreed that the writers in each workshop had to be strangers and that the numbers of men and women must be equal. Some people have concluded from this that we provide a literary introduction service. Perhaps one of my readers, even after the careful account I have so far given, supposes even now that only half the bedrooms will be occupied each night during this workshop.

  Even if my suspicious reader, like all my readers, is only someone I called into being this morning on this veranda, still I consider myself bound to answer truthfully. In any case, what do I have to gain by writing anything but the truth in these circumstances?

  I spent last night alone in my room. I cannot imagine why I would not spend tonight and every other night of the workshop alone in my room—unless the whole of the history of the Waldo movement has been an elaborate practical joke of which I am the sole victim, and unless I am the only writer in this house who believes that if I were to try a certain door-knob tonight it should only be for the purpose of thrusting a little way into the darkness the thick bundle of all the pages I have written, with not even my true name on them, before I creep back to my room.

  I cannot answer for any other writer, of course, but I hereby declare my faith in the doctrine that persuaded me to give up poetry and to come to this stony hill to learn how to write truly. I believe as a Waldo writer that my existence is only justified by the writing of prose fiction. And for inspiration I look to Campobello Man.

  You Waldo writers reading this know very well who I mean. But my imaginary reader far from this hill could not have heard even the title of the book that explains everything.

  Isles Fogbound: The Writer on the Wrong Side of America—have any of us read this book as it deserves to be read, and changed our lives accordingly? I am no better than any of you. I can expound the thesis of many a chapter, yet I have still not felt in my heart the joy that is promised in the last pages; I have still not seen the changed world that I ought to see all around me if only I could give myself wholly over to Waldo.

  How can I think of everything I see as no more and no less than a detail in a work of fiction? I walked a little way down this hill before breakfast. From every outcrop of stones and gravel a small vine of hardenbergia grew: the same mauve that I look for in every garden I walk past in the suburbs of Melbourne. Yet I stared at the mauve against the golden-brown and could think of no place for it in any piece of prose fiction I might write. Perhaps the mauve and the brown belong in the fiction of another writer, and perhaps this is the sense of those ambiguous pa
ssages in the last pages of the inspired volume of Waldo.

  When I knelt and touched the soil a surprising image came to me. The flaky stones had the look and the feel of a thick layer of face-powder plastered oddly on her face by a woman not quite right in the head. A different sort of writer might follow this image wherever it leads.

  Of all I have read in Frances Da Pavia and Patrick McLear I remember mostly the smaller details and the quirky propositions. From the accounts of the first workshops I remember the custom of making the newly arrived writers walk all around the rooms and corridors counting windows. They could consider themselves for the time being dwellers in the House of Fiction, but they ought to acknowledge that the house had considerably fewer windows than Henry James had asserted. As for the windows, even though I have never set foot on the North American continent I can see the dark-blue sky, the green of Penobscot Bay, and above all, the pearly-grey of the fogs—even the painted fogs on the double panes of the rooms for those who wanted to live Waldo doctrine to the fullest.

  I am familiar too with all the contrivances that were fitted to the house for those who wanted to spy on their fellow writers by day or night. (In these temporary quarters we have no opportunity for the intensive spying that Waldo has always permitted without directly encouraging. A Waldo writer is urged not so much to spy as to feel always under close surveillance, and the spy-holes and carelessly hidden cameras all around the house in Maine are to promote this feeling. How many writers make use of these things Waldo officially does not trouble itself to learn. No one on this hilltop would have drilled through the artist’s walls, but anyone would have been free to bring their own equipment with them, and one of you five readers of the first draft of this may be reading it not for the first time.)

  I have only sometimes glimpsed the world through Waldo’s eyes, but I have meditated often on the map of North America as Da Pavia and McLear taught me to see it. The people of the continent are mostly going in the wrong direction.

  The people are all being carried blindly westward. They are all hoping to reach a place of bright sunlight where they will see enacted deeds befitting the end of a long journey. But the people are all going the wrong way.

  The coast of Maine is almost the farthest place where a group of American writers can stand and declare that they have gone, literally as well as spiritually, against the prevailing currents of their nation. But even in the stone house in Waldo County, the writers wanted to say more than this; and so began the game of the islands.

  The people of America are being carried blindly along in the path of the sun, but not the writers of Waldo. They huddle on their clifftop and set their faces towards Penobscot Bay. America, these writers say, is a book. They themselves may be situated within the pages of America, but they stand where they stand to signify that the subject of their own fiction lies behind the readers and even the writers of America.

  The man who wrote under the name of Stendhal is supposed to have said in 1830 that he wrote his fiction for readers of 1880. Frances Da Pavia and Patrick McLear announced in 1950 that their fiction of that year was being written for the reader of 1900. (To make their arithmetic quite clear: they were writing in 1960 for the readers of 1890; and if the co-founders were alive today in 1985 they would have in mind the readers of 1865.) Towards the end of their lives Da Pavia and McLear thought of themselves as privileged to be drawing still nearer to the putative age when no word of fiction had yet been written. And just before their sudden deaths, our founders were preoccupied with the question what mode of fictional address the lucky writer would choose for that generation for whom a sentence such as Call me Waldo … and all that it could possibly mean were solid items of a factual world.

  This is what first drew me to Waldo of all the schools of fiction I might have joined: this earnest undertaking by Waldo writers to shape their sentences not according to habits of thinking in their own day but as though each writer is writing from a separate island just short of the notional beginning of the mainland.

  In the early years of the game the writers chose from actual islands. Before beginning a workshop each writer would consult large-scale maps of the coast. Then, on the first morning in the stone house and while the fog outside was still unmoving, table and chair would be carefully aligned so that the seated writer faced the blank double-page of America and a word would be whispered in the monkish room. For the remaining six days of the workshop, Monhegan, Matinicus, or Great Wass would mark the place where the true story of America was being written; where a writer that the writer in the room could only dream of found the words to write; where the invisible was on the point of becoming visible.

  Although every page of fiction purporting to have been written at these places was burned in due course, still rumours and gossip hung around the stone house, and each new group of writers seemed to know which islands had been claimed in earlier years and which dwindling few had never been written from. In the last year before the game changed its direction, members of the workshop had to choose from mere rocks and nameless shoals. Then someone who claimed afterwards not to have noticed the dots and dashes of the international border swerving strangely south-west across the inked ocean wrote that he dreamed of someone writing dreamlike prose on Campobello.

  What happened during the following week enriched the theory and traditions of Waldo, it was said, immeasurably beyond the hopes of the co-founders. (I prefer to believe that Da Pavia and McLear foresaw confidently the scope, if not the details, of the Campobello Migration and wrote about it in some of the best of their lost typescripts.) In a word, the writers for that week were divided quite by accident into two groups. The first had consulted in the Waldo Library (Can any of us in this house almost bare of books imagine what a treasury of recondite lore is the library in the original stone house?) an atlas in which coloured inks were used only for the nation or the state which happened to be the designated subject-matter for that page, surrounding areas being colourless, ghostly, almost bare of printed names. The second group consulted an atlas in which the colours reached to the very margins of every page, no matter what political or geographical borders crossed the page itself. So for one group Campobello—the island, the man supposed to be writing there, and the host of invisible possibilities behind the word itself—gave pleasure because it was perversely located in a place that a writer might actually visit if he or she was literal-minded enough to want to travel through the fog and even further along the schematic edge of America. (This group was further divided into those who recognised that Campobello Island is part of the Province of New Brunswick and those who believed it to be the utmost outpost of the State of Maine.) The second group, having seen a pale blob on their map and having deliberately refused to turn to the pages presenting a coloured Canada—not even to learn the name of the blob, supposed Campobello and everything arising from it to be the result of an ingenious invented cataclysm.

  They supposed that at some time during the filling-in of the blank double-page of the continent and while the ink of America, so to speak, was still not dry, someone of far-reaching imaginative power had taken each page by its outermost edge, lifted the two pages upwards and inwards, and pressed them firmly together, even rubbing certain patches at random fiercely up against one another for simple delight.

  How can the result of this be best described? America as a mirror of itself? America turned inside out and around about? America as a page in a dream-atlas? With this map in mind a writer could see in the forests of New England the colours of New Mexican deserts; could see, as I myself once saw (admittedly in an atlas published in England), the word Maine clearly printed near Flagstaff, Arizona, and the word Maineville near Loveland, Ohio. But of all the thousands of embellishments and verbal puzzles and aimless or fragmented roads and trails now added to America, what most appealed to the writers in the stone house was the simple notion of a Beautiful Plain as the primordial setting for fiction and the Handsome Plainsman as the original of all fict
ional characters, if not of all writers of fiction.

  I could write an entire short novel on this subject, but I am only a minor poet taking his first stumbling steps as a writer of fiction; and in any case my first task is to finish this account of the most wonderful week in the history of Waldo.

  After the bonfire of that week the writers meditated on the two versions of Campobello: the writer as finder of blank spaces on actual maps, and the writer as finder of quite new double-pages of maps. And what those writers never forgot was that the fiction from each of their two groups had been indistinguishable. The so-called Campobello Migration that followed meant simply that all Waldo writers were free from then onwards to locate the ideal source of their fiction in places even further east than New Brunswick or in places whose names or parts of whose names might have appeared on a map of Maine if certain pages of atlases were rubbed together, figuratively speaking, before their colours had finally dried.

  * * *

  The shadows of the nearest trees have now reached the yellow flagstones under my writing-table. The time is late in the afternoon. And just a moment ago I heard the sudden starting-up of a motor car.

  The artist who owns this house left a badly written note explaining how to operate the pumps that bring water up the hill from the underground storage tanks, and for some reason he scrawled at the bottom: Late in day find spot on back veranda with terrific view of Melb skyline so long no smog.

  As I write these words, a motor car is following the winding road downwards between these hard hills where off-blue hardenbergia sprouts wild between outcrops of dull-gold talc. In the motor car is a writer who believes wholeheartedly, as I believe, in the claims of Waldo fiction. The writer has submitted to being expelled from this house as the penalty for sending a message to a fellow writer by means other than the inserting of an allusion into a passage of fiction. If I am the person who was meant to receive the message, I can write truthfully that I have never received it.